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spoon0042 posted:I still have trouble believing something containing the words "free baby market" could be anything other than satire in the vein of A Modest Proposal but apparently there are idiots who are deadly serious about it. What I find baffling is that there's all of this "well you should own yourself and be free" but then they're suggesting literally selling living, breathing humans on a free market. Like, OK, it's not OK to own and coerce somebody, unless they're a baby. Cool, got it.
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May 23, 2014 15:37
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SedanChair posted:See, a Ferengi would give you a copy of the Rules of Acquisition because he could use your interest to sell you a nicer bound copy later. The irony of the Ferengi was that they were intended to be villains but the writers realized there just wasn't much threatening about them. They were also ironically one of the most trustworthy races in that yeah they'd try to dick you over but you know they're guaranteed to do that but at the same time the rules of acquisition basically said that a regular customer is the best thing over so keep him happy. Caros posted:Honestly these job losses are just the beginning. The damage caused by the Brownback government isn't something that is going to make the state implode by itself, though it certainly won't help. The damage caused is going to linger over decades as infrastructure goes to poo poo and schools suffer lower graduation rates and far lower scores. And at the end of the day the Laffer curve benefits that Brownback expected simply aren't going to materialize. He is going to do generational harm to his state just to reassert something we've known is total bullshit since the early nineties. The Laffer curve crap always amuses me because the right assumes that any amount of taxation is on the right side of the curve. Theoretically the Laffer curve makes sense but in practice it's used as an excuse to cut taxes to the bone. This is also a case where it becomes extremely apparent that lolbertarianism just isn't interested in any sense of morality. It's just "less laws, all the time." We've seen that it doesn't work but all told they just don't care. They won't be happy until Mad Max World is real. But all you're going to hear is "well we obviously didn't cut taxes enough." The really stupid thing is that the massive cuts to U.S. education overall that are happening are going to very seriously gently caress over America in the long run. The world is getting to the point where you need a highly education population to accomplish much of anything. The days of learning to farm on the family farm and being a farmer or starting in the mail room during high school and working your way up the chain are long gone. The other massive snag is that this sort of crap leads to massively increased social unrest as the wealthy can afford to just buy their children whatever education and privilege they need to be successful while the poor get left with the scraps, if there even are any. When public schools can't even afford to teach kids basic requirements something has gone horrifically wrong.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:48
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Talmonis posted:Honestly I hope they do suffer the effects, and that the Federal Government ignores all but humanitarian requests for aid. Make sure nobody starves, but absolutely let them live in the bed they made. You want no taxes and no services? Here you go. Enjoy. I feel like this just sums up a lot of the current state of America's politics in general, thanks to how much power the right wing is still throwing around all over. Who needs a stable, well-fed, educated work force, anyway? Rampant poverty and massive social unrest sure are amazing. Mmhm. eNeMeE posted:That anyone takes that thing seriously enough to even consider it is laughable, but even if it was true there's no evidence that anyone is currently on the right hand slope instead of the left hand slope. That's the short of the problem, really, and especially when you look at trickle-down economics. Sorry but the rich don't exactly have a history of letting their money trickle anywhere. More often they just sit on it or buy politicians to get them even more money.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:51
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Nolanar posted:The Non-Aggression Principle, along with the Axiom of Human Action, are the two (I think they're separate, but maybe he's deriving one from the other?) big things JRod's arguments all stem from / assume, and I have so many questions about them that he's never answered. But you're absolutely right. The problem is he's trying to convince us that our beliefs are inconsistent by showing how they violate his moral code. Since we're coming at every issue from a completely different starting point, actual argument on real-world topics becomes difficult beyond just poking at inconsistencies. The basic idea that lolbertarians oppose stuff like taxation on is that taxation is ultimately not really voluntary. The basic idea is that if you do not pay your taxes then you get fined and arrested. If you choose to not be fined and arrested and resist it then the police are allowed to manhandle you. If you resist the manhandling or become violent they are allowed to be violent with you. Basically if you just go "lolnope" and never pay a single tax dollar you're going to be locked up, possibly forcibly. Thus, by extention, the state is holding a gun to your head and saying "pay up, fuckstick." So, by using any service that he paid tax for you are perpetuating violence on him. Similarly, by regulating what he can and can't do with his property under penalty of the law you are perpetuating violence on him. The basic idea he's getting at is that all association should be totally voluntary. As in, you should not levy taxes to build public roads but rather people should be free to donate to roads or pay for toll roads as they need to use them. That sort of thing. Nobody should be holding a gun to anybody's head (as in, levying taxes) to get public things paid for. The logic is that "it's for the public good" is poor justification for threatening to harm somebody's person if they don't pay their taxes. That's where the non-aggression principle comes in; the basis of government should be people voluntarily ponying up the dough for public works rather than the government threatening police action if you don't. And yes it's a loving stupid argument. It falls apart because total deregulation allows things like a cartel buying up every shred of road in existence and demanding ridiculous prices to use them. Or, alternately, leads to needless complexity. Roads is one that comes to mind. Instead of paying taxes for roads you'd be charged road charges only for the roads you actually used and how much time you used them. Which is dumb because then you need to have somebody decided how much road you used and figuring out how much to charge you. It's much simpler to have a system of "we need $X to have roads so let's collect $X in taxes and just let people use the roads for like whatever." ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 01:31
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paragon1 posted:Is not making GBS threads in the streets voluntary? I mean if I do it the police will tell me to stop, and if I don't they'll shoot me with guns. No see everybody in the community would obviously just get together and agree to not poo poo in the streets because nobody likes having poo poo in the streets. You don't really need that kind of law, you know, as the community would just agree "no street making GBS threads" and then just not do it.
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Dec 24, 2014 01:49
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Nolanar posted:I mean, sure, I've seen this specific train of catastrophizing logic before, but at least that has the "men with guns shoot me!" in it eventually. I was wondering more along the lines of assertions like "trespassing/pollution/fraud is violent," which I've seen tossed around a little. What definition of violence are we working from there? If you are trespassing you are using land that belongs to somebody else without their consent. If you pollute the you are dumping nasty poo poo on land that belongs to somebody else without their consent. If you are committing fraud you taking property from somebody else without their consent. All of these are harmful so they are considered violence i the idea of "causing harm to another person." Of course the way you prevent people from committing said acts of violence is never actually explained beyond "well obviously people would get together and agree not to harm each other" but like how would you enforce that without any acts of "violence?" If you can't even take somebody's money without their consent how would you even levy a fine?
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Dec 24, 2014 02:40
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VitalSigns posted:How is it fraud if you didn't get the person to consent to give you some property? If they don't consent and you just grab it, isn't that just stealing? If you really look at it fraud is just another form of theft the details are just different. But still, the whole basis of ancap thought is basically consent. QuarkJets posted:Practitioners of praxeology only take issue with evidence if it contradicts their ideas. It's totally okay if some empirical evidence proves them right once in awhile, because they knew they were right all along. But if empirical evidence "proves" them wrong, then there's something wrong with the evidence. Well see they'd be totally willing to pay for them, just so long as nobody is forcing them to, you know what I mean? The stupid thing is that there are some areas where privatizing it is just plain stupid. I've had really dumb arguments with lolbertarians that were totally OK with things like private fire departments. Like well if you didn't pay your fire department insurance and your house catches fire, well guess we just let it burn down! Totally ignoring that that could very easily catch the whole neighborhood on fire. A lack of public emergency services would guarantee an increase in preventable disasters but at least we'd be more free! Which is the other thing that ancaps fail to realize; paying taxes for emergency services means that they'll be there no matter what.
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Dec 24, 2014 03:28
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Mr Interweb posted:Yup, that is correct, thank you.. Really if you look at it the right doesn't actually care it the employment numbers improve or not. The rich get richer so it's a success in that it's doing what it's intended. The whole "well we obviously just didn't cut things hard enough, let's cut everything even more!" nonsense is just justification. The only reason they say that is so that they can tell the base that they'll be rich some day too, we just need to get the government out of the way so you can make yourselves rich. It's why the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote just keeps ringing true. The right has convinced their base that they're all a bunch of ubermensch that would be totally filling swimming pools with $100 bills if it weren't for those loving liberals preventing it from happening deliberately just to be mean.
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Dec 24, 2014 22:42
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Mr Interweb posted:Actually, maybe my original claim might not have been fair. Deus, Jrode and some others in this thread may in fact be true believers in that they truly do feel libertarian will somehow benefit the common man. As opposed to hacks like Stephen Moore and Peter Schiff. One thing that lolbertarians utterly and completely fail to realize, often willfully, is that the biggest irony of a free market and free society is that it relies heavily on regulation to make sure that somebody doesn't rig the game. This is what we're seeing in America; fewer regulations that are allowing the very wealthy to just gently caress everything up with total impunity. The answer in this case isn't fewer laws but rather more and actually loving enforcing the ones we have. America is horrifyingly far from a free market in that a few gigantic companies basically just run everything. The nation's wealth is held in very few hands and those born on the wrong side of the tracks are extremely lucky if they ever break loose of their social status. Those born poor tend to stay that way no matter what they do. Aside from that expanded access to education (which requires, you know, taxation) would go a long way toward approaching the meritocracy that libertarians so adore. Plus a truly free, even market requires government oversight to make sure that things like enormous monopolies, cartels, and price fixing don't happen, which become absolutely loving rampant the instant you take your hands off. The 19th century is actually a good example of what happens if you just take your hands off and let the rich run the show and it was loving awful.
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Dec 26, 2014 05:20
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Mr Interweb posted:Speaking of meritocracy, how do conservatives/libertarians justify repealing the estate tax? By doing so, they're implicitly making the claim that people who actually work hard to earn their money are on the same level as those that inherit it. Not very meritocratic, is it? Generally it's justified in the "taxes = theft" category. As in, if a person earned the money they have every right to do what they want with it, up to and including giving their offspring a massive head start. And no, your average lolbertarian doesn't give a single poo poo about meritocracy. If they did they'd support banning private education and funding the poo poo out of public education but that requires taxes, which are evil.
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Dec 27, 2014 00:30
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Cemetry Gator posted:Do Libertarians really think that some of the "failures" of policing wouldn't happen in a private company. The same issue will always come up. You can only have so many police officers. They can only be in so many places at once. Their job is to investigate and bring people to justice. Yes, ideally, they're stopping crimes, but that's not really the reality of the situation. Libertarians believe that the perfect libertopia wouldn't need police anyway but we don't live there yet. They also believe that private police companies would be more efficient because the profit motive would force them to cut costs and be more efficient. A basic belief of libertarians is that the government is inherently inefficient in everything it does, all the time, forever. More extreme flavors believe that you should be allowed to opt out and live without laws if you really want to. Even so, the belief is that private is always better and more efficient than public but we can already see in the private prison system how loving terrible an idea putting private anything in law enforcement actually is. Making the police increasingly private would also lead to way more corruption and abuse of power. To make matters worse people that can't afford to pay for police services would be completely boned and at the mercy of people that could. In a way we're already seeing some of that in the legal system. Whoever can hire the best lawyers can probably get away with poo poo or corrupt the system if they try hard enough and pay enough money. Hell there are even cases where companies win legal battles by just shoveling money into lawyers until the other side can't pay legal fees anymore and just gives up. The other argument is that if there were many private police companies doing the policing people would just automatically gravitate toward the one that never fucks up because, as we all know, corporations and businesses are always perfect and never, ever make mistakes. They most certainly aren't rampantly negligent when they can get away with it either.
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Dec 31, 2014 01:51
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Cemetry Gator posted:Really, one issue with Libertarianism, ironically, is that they fail to recognize that money is power while oddly recognizing that at the same time. I guess maybe, if you were trying to say it better than I just did and be less ponderous, you would say they don't fully grasp the idea that money is power. Well they do realize that money = power but they believe that if everything is deregulated completely then the market will sort itself out somehow because reasons. It's "well God works in mysterious ways" levels of reasoning. The belief is that it will just work, we swear. Like, people would just not do business with a company that ran corrupt police so the business would obviously just shrivel and die. They realize that money is power but the belief is that people would definitely vote with their wallets and collectively remove the funding of a corrupt police company. The end goal is to have the people having all the power while failing to realize how much corruption libertarian policy tends to lead to. Libertarianism would work if everybody had equal access to perfect information and nobody was trying to gently caress anybody else over. It's the whole "well in a perfect world..." nonsense. Sorry kids, this isn't a perfect world.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:01
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Mr Interweb posted:The point has been made a few times already in this thread, but it really bears repeating. Libertarians always argue that that we don't need regulations to prevent companies from doing bad things because once people find out a company did a bad thing everyone else will immediately stop doing business with them. But if that's true, why are companies like Dow Chemical, BP, Toyota, GM, Comcast, etc. still around? Is there something about the "State" existing that somehow forces the citizenry to continue doing businesses with such companies that wouldn't happen in libertopia? The argument that is sometimes made, and it's actually a legitimate one, is that a lot of those companies are riding on government corruption. GM effectively has a negative tax rate. Comcast will often sign contracts with local areas setting themselves up as literally the only company you can get TV and internet from. Actually that company is notoriously lovely for being anti-competition. In these cases the lolbertarians are right in that these companies should not get as much government help as they do and, if that help wasn't there, somebody would be less lovely and get the business. One major problem with America is that crony capitalism is rampant and the government has picked winners in certain markets. You literally can't compete with certain companies. It is impossible. The problem is that they extend this attitude toward all regulation and government meddling in the market. As we've seen certain regulations are basically required to prevent things like, you know, the financial market deliberately tanking the world economy because they could make a few bucks doing so. Sure this is along the lines of a broken clock being right twice a day but they're against all of it. They're partially right on that one but like you said they also believe that racism can be solved by the market, as can corruption and yes they're very wrong.
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Jan 2, 2015 04:30
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QuarkJets posted:"Mixing your labor" is one of the dumbest features of libertarianism, and it's also my favorite because it's downright anti-capitalist in nature. If you take it to its logical conclusion, it completely destroys the bourgeoisie. If you work on an assembly line, you've mixed your labor with whatever part of the assembly line you happen to be working, therefore it becomes yours. This lets you charge the next guy in the assembly line a "fair market" value for whatever you produce, and in turn you pay the people behind you. The only person who does not get paid is the original factory owner, since that person doesn't work in the factory. Rinse and repeat; bakers own the ovens, the maid owns your house, etc. Libertarians hold themselves in great esteem and believe that they will become the factory owners in their libertarian free-market paradise, but if everyone follows the "mix your labor with the land to make the land yours" philosophy then there can be no factory owners. But if you manage a factory you are increasing its efficiency which benefits everybody there. If you invent something you have made everything better and everybody that uses said invention must pay you. What they generally believe is that they are genius ubermensch that will have amazing ideas that will improve everything and make them rich. It destroys the idle rich yes but they believe they're just so amazing they'll be rich anyway.
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Jan 3, 2015 04:29
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A lot of current libertarian thought comes from organizations funded almost entirely by dark money from people like the Kochs. In some cases they are all of the funding. Take a wild guess who is supposed to benefit from libertarian policy.
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Jan 4, 2015 07:39
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EvanSchenck posted:If you look at social studies education in junior high and high school, which is so to speak the sharp end of indoctrination in this country, it's trivial to identify a strong status quo bias. And it is conscious, in some places more obviously than others. Here I'm thinking of states like where the instruction is blatantly slanted to push a specific narrative, such as Arizona banning Mexican-American studies or Texas adopting openly neo-Confederate textbooks. Even discounting the extreme examples and just focuses on the general thrust of instruction towards bland centrist conservatism, you could make the argument that promoting the status quo is training low-income kids to oppose their own interests--because the status quo sucks for them. But like you say, it's not selfish. The objective of public education is to help students become productive and employable citizens, which is in their individual best interests. Whether it's in their collective best interests to shore up the status quo is another argument altogether. Education can actually end up being dramatically different between the economic classes. Schools in poor areas tend to be of the "sit down, shut up" variety with lovely funding, a lack of equipment, and a heavier focus on doing what you're told. Gifted programs are sometimes flat lie where wealthy children get in while the poor are kept out regardless of intelligence. Private schools tend to not only have more resources available but also have a dramatically different style of education. A working-class education is basically "sit down, do what you're told, memorize all this poo poo, never question anything."
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Jan 10, 2015 17:09
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Hey if I want to get my medical care from my hairdresser it's my God-given right! I want to take care of getting a haircut, a root canal, and a physical all in one go all in the same place and Cheryl is an expert on hair so she's obviously smart enough to understand literally everything. I have this one tooth that needs pulled and removing an unwanted tooth is the same as removing unwanted hair, right?
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Jan 12, 2015 03:44
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Mr Interweb posted:Also, why does the most freedom-y state in the country, Texas, have the worst uninsured rate? With low taxes, denying medicaid expansion and tort reform, you'd think everyone would be covered thanks to the power of the FREE MARKET. Obviously Texas just has an exceptional amount of lazy people that don't want to earn medical care.
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Jan 13, 2015 22:42
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Mr Interweb posted:Also, curious: do libertarians believe recessions can occur in libertopia? I remember watching a debate with Peter Schiff where he keeps blaming most economic problems on the Fed and said the best time in the U.S.' history was from the 1870s to the early 1900s (seems he somehow was able to catch himself not including that whole slavery period at the last second), but we've had tons of recessions, and even Depressions (!) during those times so I'm wondering what the hell? Depends on who you ask. Some believe the only way things can go in libertopia is up. Others believes that recessions can happen but things will just be overall better so recessions won't be as bad. Others believe that people starving to death when a recession inevitably hits is "trimming the fat" or "getting rid of undesirables" which is totally a good thing and not horribly immoral at all.
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Jan 14, 2015 07:22
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Who What Now posted:I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the US had bought off the debts of everyone in foreclosure or bankruptcy directly and then immediately forgiven them, rather than subsidizing the banks. The banks still get paid, but in this scenario everyone who was on the brink of financial disaster at least has some sort of chance to take a clean slate and better themselves. But I'm not an economist, so maybe that would have been worse, I dunno. But it sounds better, anyway. Yeah but we can only encourage lovely behavior in the rich because they create jobs so it's worth it.
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Jan 14, 2015 17:00
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Heavy neutrino posted:Um excuse me but they certainly paid their indemnities when they donated massive sacks of money to both parties during every single election. Ssshhhhhhhhh be quiet. Don't say things like that. The Sacred Job Creators might hear you and take all the jobs away.
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Jan 15, 2015 00:34
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Political Whores posted:My Econ 101 text, which was pretty slanted since it was by Mankiw, had a section on the Laffer curve that ended with "just because this model failed to predict reality in practice doesn't mean it doesn't have validity". Even the shills can't defend it. The Laffer Curve is one of those things that makes sense in theory but those that quote it as a reason to cut taxes are assuming that whatever the tax rate is right now is on the right side of the curve. Any tax rate greater than 0% is assumed to be on the right side of the curve. It's especially insane when you consider that some huge companies get so much money from the government that their effective tax rate is negative but gently caress that, cut taxes more!
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Jan 15, 2015 20:05
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Political Whores posted:Sure but even then the picture the Laffer curve paints is so simplistic that it's basically worthless. There are so many different incentives and factors that could intervene (off the top of my head, the actual impossibility of projecting revenues too far into the future) that the assumptions that underlie it fall apart pretty fast. Besides, companies have a poo poo ton more options to minimize their tax burdens than forgoing profits. It also assumes that overall tax revenue and corporate profit are the only things that matter but really that's a typical AnCap line of poo poo as well. They tend to ignore things like the velocity of money and how atrociously worker were treated in the past in the name of high profits. A lot of regulations exist because The Sacred Job Creators only give a poo poo about pesky things like "safety" and "workers not dying of malnutrition" when you twist their arms and force them to.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:54
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Mr Interweb posted:1. Why would a business suddenly hire more people if they don't need them just cause they have some extra money left over? If I run a small store where I only employ one cashier and he's able to handle dealing with our influx of customers, I don't need to hire another person. I'm just going to pocket that extra money. The theory isn't that you'd just hire more workers because you could but that you'd expand your business with the money or invest it somewhere. That's the fundamental theory of trickle-down economics. If you give a guy that's started some businesses money to start another business he'll obviously start another. What we're seeing, however, is that the rich don't let their money trickle anywhere and the only thing they use money for is getting more money. There are literally trillions of dollars (in the dozens now, I think) that are just being sat on by the rich. You know, the same people that are saying that creating more money is bad, all inflation is bad, and the poor should just borrow more money they'll so graciously lend them if they don't want to starve to death this week.
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Jan 15, 2015 22:09
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Lemming posted:The idea of trickle down - they make more money, grow more businesses, spread the wealth - also only works if you assume that supply is all that matters. If you have ten billion dollars to make your business huge, but demand is depressed in your economy, there's going to be nobody to buy the poo poo you're making, so instead you Scrooge McDuck your money pile. It's not wrong to say that if you have money you're likely to invest it to make more, but you're missing the half of the picture which is that you can only do that in an environment where there's room to grow. The basic idea behind supply-side economics is that if you create more supply then the price goes down. It was a response to the demand-side economics that things like food stamps rely on. But like you said, if there isn't demand the supply doesn't do much. Supply-side economics were also used as the argument for just handing the wealthiest among us more money. See, they'd spend that money on making more supply! Instead they just stuffed the money in a bank account and sat on it. The end result was no direct on supply but a reduction in demand because now the government has less money. A lot of this bastardization and corruption of actual economic theories. Yes, the laws of supply and demand are real. If the supply dries up and demand is the same the price goes up. If demand does not change but supply increases then the price goes down. However, that requires the supply to actually loving increase in the first place. Reaganomics didn't accomplish that.
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Jan 15, 2015 22:24
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Mr Interweb posted:But don't you still have the same problem in the end? If a job creator had an idea to expand/invest in another area or whatever, presumably he'd do it regardless of the tax rate. And like I said, this works even less during recessions since no one's buying poo poo to begin with. Yeah most AnCap or lolbertarian thoughts just fall apart if you look at them and breathe too hard in their direction.
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Jan 15, 2015 22:35
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Muscle Tracer posted:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/the-em-trillions-em-of-dollars-us-companies-are-hoarding-overseas/359928/ https://www.cnbc.com/id/101354173 https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/super-rich-hide-21-trillion-offshore-study-says/ https://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/16/us-column-dcjohnston-idlecash-idUSBRE86F0GK20120716 https://www.businessinsider.com/rbc-2-trillion-corporate-cash-balance-sheet-2012-3 Nobody is quite sure exactly how much it is because apparently a great deal of money has been just kind of disappearing into offshore accounts, overseas banks, and tax havens.
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Jan 16, 2015 03:18
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Holy poo poo, do you have a source on that? Where can I learn more about that?
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Disinterested posted:Bitcoin is a legit preoccupation of libertarians, as is the idea of currency competition. Ron Paul is notably, of course, obsessed with this - as he is with the idea of the return to the gold standard. The most amusing thing about Buttcoins is the rampant fraud and financial fuckery that market has had to deal with for the entirety of its existence. So much for the free market doing better than regulations. Nah gently caress it, who cares, let's just embrace the incessant theft, price fixing, and market manipulation, it's totally a good thing. Then the gold standard. Oh boy. "But gold has inherent value!" Yeah well, so does wood. Why not go on a wood standard? Wood has inherent value. People buy and sell wood all the loving time and it's actually really, really useful. Like you can build houses and poo poo with wood so let's embrace the Wood Dollar! Or how about shirts? Shirts have inherent value. We need to enact a shirt standard immediately!
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Jan 18, 2015 02:27
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Disinterested posted:The most hilarious thing about Libertarians who believe in gold buggism is that it's mostly their own favourite economists who disproved the idea most effectively as fundamentally idiotic. I like how they just kind of ignore the mountains of historical evidence that points to the gold standard being pretty freaking stupid but just hand wave it away with "well they were doing it wrong!"
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Jan 18, 2015 02:48
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Caros posted:To be fair, gold was a really good option for a currency during it's run. Gold is pretty much one of the only elements that fills most of the fundamental needs of a currency: That's actually kind of my point as to why you can just pick any old arbitrary standard at all. The really interesting thing is that gold standards basically give way to other standards by default. For a long time (and this is how paper money came around) it was the promise of gold that was traded rather than the gold itself. Bank notes became the de facto currency because it's easier to move a piece of paper that says "10 pounds, gold" than it is to move the gold itself. It's also more secure. "10 pounds of gold, payable to only Richy McMerchantpants" is harder to steal and easier to track than just ten pounds of raw gold. Eventually fiat currency happened because people realized paper can represent value. What lolbertarians fail to realize is that fiat currency is basically an everything standard. As long as you have some of value (absolutely anything that somebody will pay for, including your time) you can exchange it for dollars which can then be exchanged for other stuff. It isn't strongly tied to gold which makes it much harder to manipulate for people that have a poo poo load of gold. Plus gold leads to insane things like mercantilism and colonialism. I really don't think it would be a good idea to go back to a world which was basically run on the basis of "hey let's see which rear end in a top hat king can stuff the most shiny crap in a vault somewhere."
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Jan 18, 2015 03:28
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CommieGIR posted:Who does people like Jrod think will totally control the market right out of the gate and smash start-ups like a annoying fly? What is to stop Fortune 500 Industrial and Corporations from completely cornering the market? Nothing. That's exactly the problem and the greatest irony of a proper free market. The government needs to regulate the poo poo out of it and prevent monopolies to keep the market properly free. Otherwise you get, you know, Standard Oil. Libertarians need to read about the 19th century and see all the reasons why regulation started happening in the first place. Some of the poo poo that happened during the 1800's in the name of profit is downright horrifying.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:23
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Literally The Worst posted:Idea for a start-up: Creating start-ups that exist solely to be bought out It's actually extremely common in the software world for people to start small companies with the explicit plan, from day one, to sell them the instant whatever they're coding becomes something they can sell.
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Jan 22, 2015 17:34
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asdf32 posted:The compelling thing about these posts is how the state has never committed annecdotal atrocities. The difference being that that sort of thing happens literally every time somebody creates a new market and says "I will make this totally free and unregulated and there will be magic!" Like I'm serious. Anybody that has played an MMO from its earliest days has seen this. More importantly you need to keep coming up with new things on the "poo poo you aren't allowed to do" list because the scammers are always coming up with new ones. Once money is involved there are people who would murder their own children if it made them a few dollars. Like as fun as EVE Online was in its own way I would never, ever want the real world market to be run like that. Fraud, lying, misrepresenting goods, taking the money and running, lotteries that nobody ever won...this poo poo was rampant.
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Feb 24, 2015 04:05
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asdf32 posted:poo poo also happens literally every time somone created a state. And how states are set up and organized are improved over time. poo poo ain't perfect but we're working on it. When states go wrong we admit it and try to come up with better ideas or tweak the rules to fit the new problems. Libertarianism does not do this. It's just "well you didn't free market hard enough!" all the time.
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Feb 24, 2015 04:37
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asdf32 posted:The last post I remember him making was a defence of Marx's asiatic mode of production. Marxism itself being a great example of an ideology that's been swept aside in practice by academic consensus. The reason Marxism can't happen yet is because scarcity still exists. Marx's question was "what happens after capitalism?" For the time being we're stuck with capitalism but the world overall is becoming more and more socialist as it becomes easier to cheaply provide everybody's needs. Marx's point was that there would come a time when it became so incredibly cheap to give everybody everything they need that capitalism would fall away and become unnecessary. Think of it this way; if we had a machine that could produce infinite food at no cost why would we not feed everybody?
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Feb 24, 2015 17:10
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Disinterested posted:That is an incredibly rose-tinted version of Marxism, and a misreading. Marx does predict the revolution in the richest countries, but he believes it will stem from deepening crises and tensions, not the imminent arrival of utopia. Well yeah the magic food machine would probably have to be taken by force before the rich let go of it but drat it let me dream of a (tremendously unlikely) velvet revolution.
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Feb 24, 2015 17:19
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asdf32 posted:Actually I'm on the record saying that post scarcity leading to some form of socialism is very plausible, if probably distant. As you correctly point out, capitalism doen't work in a post scarcity world. I'm also on the record saying, as Disinterested pointed out, that such a result would have nothing to do with Marxism. A post scarcity end to capitalism is roughly as Marxist as an asteroid apocalypse. And that is exactly why Marx said that a revolution was basically mandatory to break out of capitalism. The problem with capitalism is that as individual workers can produce more and more they end up getting less and less for their class overall simply because fewer of them become needed to do anything. You can see this now with increased automation. The moneyed classes (i.e., the people that own everything already) are less inclined to give to the non-moneyed classes because there is no need to. As the production capacity per worker increases the supply of labor surpasses demand and you end up with decreasing wages and increasing poverty. That of course leads to unrest and the wealthy aren't inclined to share. It's possible to transition to increased socialism peacefully but there are some people that will resist that tooth and nail because there is profit to be made keeping capitalism going. In the magic food machine example even if it is infinite if there is only one there will be people trying to fight for exclusive control of it as that's the control of the food supply. If a person can control the machine they can control the world using the threat of starvation. Nobody can produce food more cheaply than free so they can undercut everybody else and be the only source. That's a problem inherent in capitalism that we're seeing now; you need land to produce food but so many people don't own land they have no hope of producing their own food and must rely on those with money to pay them to do things. The super rich control an obscene portion of the money supply and thus have an extreme amount of control over the working class. Things like income assistance, welfare, subsidized housing, and food stamps go a long way to reducing these issues but notice that lolbertarians and the right hate these more than anything. The end result of removing these is handing the food machine to the rich. With no social safety net and no alternate way to survive other than selling your time to somebody wealthier than you the wealthy can dictate the price of the time. The extremely wealthy can just say "well you'll make me wealthier or you will starve to death. Choose wisely." People don't like being told that's the only choice they have in life and become unruly. In that case the question is how long can the wealthy hold on to control of the infinite food machine. If they choose "gently caress you, do what I want or starve" you increase the likelihood of revolution. I'm also begging the question of "why should we not feed everybody" simply because it's an important thing to think about. If you're saying "we should not feed everybody if we are able" what you are saying is that whoever controls the food controls the poor.
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Feb 24, 2015 17:39
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Disinterested posted:The best thing about it is that they still don't regard this as an experiment that has already been run. No you see they just didn't free market hard enough. We need to take that situation and make it even freer and marketer!
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Feb 24, 2015 18:24
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asdf32 posted:Automation competing with labor in the marketplace to drive down wages isn't Marx either. I'm not using Marxist ideas alone and I never do. I'm also thinking about the Wealth of Nations and other theories as well as the progression of how the stuff comes about. Adam Smith argued that capitalism was the end game. Marx argued that something came after. One of Smith's points was that capitalism was actually the end of some worse systems that had to exist before hand and the natural progression was increased automation and people making more stuff for less effort. The effort required continually goes down. Marxism does not exist in a vacuum.
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Feb 24, 2015 18:35
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OwlBot 2000 posted:JRodefeld has disappeared so SOMEONE has to take his place, right? The thing about observational evidence is that it's concrete while intuitive evidence is not. Let's say you have a barrel with a bunch of apples in it. Before counting them you go "well my gut tells me there are probably about 100 apples in the barrel." That's intuitive evidence. You make a guess based on what you know but you cannot intuit the exact number of apples in the barrel. If your intuition says "well the barrel SAYS apples and there is a layer of apples on top but I think it has 6 apples and then 10,000 crabs" then you're a loving idiot and your intuition is flawed. If the barrel is labelled "apples" and then you open it up and there is a layer of apples on top you can intuit that it's probably a barrel full of apples. You can't be certain of course but that's where observational evidence comes in. If you take everything out of the barrel and the only thing it had in it was a crap load of apples then you can say "yes that barrel was full of apples." Same with counting them; if you count all the apples in the barrel then put them back in you could say exactly how many apples it had with absolute certainty because you sat down and counted them. The problem here is that a lot of libertarians are going "I think the apple barrel is actually full of space ships" and then refusing to believe observational data when somebody dumps out all the apples and then counts them. Many libertarians are looking at the empty barrel and the apples then saying "well I still think it's full of spaceships" or going "well now we have an empty barrel and a bunch of apples on the ground so you're still wrong."  edit: And when it comes to Randists and those that swear by praxeology and nothing else if you ask "how many apples are in that barrel?" they're responding with nonsense answers like "well who owns the apples?" or "some people like apples so the apples have value." A lot of information relating to apples is frequently irrelevant to the question asked. Similarly if we're asking "should we eat the apples or not?" the Randists are going to be totally OK with it if whoever owns them goes "nah, I don't care if people are hungry, let them rot." ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 24, 2015 |
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Feb 24, 2015 21:44
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